Tag Archives: Social Policy

Little Rock The headline was no tipoff on this piece in the Times’ business section. Another article about how much the economics of single parent households really suck, blah, blah, blah, please tell us something we didn’t know, will ya? So they did by basically in so many words and with all due concern letting we know that men, especially working men without college degrees are a problem. How can I summarize their argument delicately…men it seems are, how can we say it, losers.

“Single-parent families tend to emerge in places where the men already are a mess,” said Christopher Jencks, a professor of social policy at Harvard University. “You have to ask yourself, ‘Suppose the available men were getting married to the available women? Would that be an improvement?’ ” Instead of making marriage more attractive, he said, it might be better for society to help make men more attractive.

“Make men more attractive.” Now that’s a lifetime project for many men and, way too often, an ambition for the women, parents, and children who love them.

The argument here was based on a recent study from an MIT professor David Autor and Melanie Wasserman, his graduate assistant. They note that there is a vicious cycle pulling some men down in their view:

In this telling, the economic struggles of male workers are both a cause and an effect of the breakdown of traditional households. Men who are less successful are less attractive as partners, so some women are choosing to raise children by themselves, in turn often producing sons who are less successful and attractive as partners. “A vicious cycle may ensue,” wrote Professor Autor and his co-author, Melanie Wasserman, a graduate student, “with the poor economic prospects of less educated males creating differentially large disadvantages for their sons, thus potentially reinforcing the development of the gender gap in the next generation.”

So as the reporter, Binyamin Appelbaum hustled around trying to get a grip on this phenomena from one academic to another, he basically found that the experts all agree: it’s a head scratcher!

Among people who were 35 years old in 2010, for example, women were 17 percent more likely to have attended college, and 23 percent more likely to hold an undergraduate degree. “I think the greatest, most astonishing fact that I am aware of in social science right now is that women have been able to hear the labor market screaming out ‘You need more education’ and have been able to respond to that, and men have not,” said Michael Greenstone, an M.I.T. economics professor who was not involved in Professor Autor’s work. “And it’s very, very scary for economists because people should be responding to price signals. And men are not. It’s a fact in need of an explanation.”

So it turns out there are terrible consequences at the deepest levels of society, including family life and class stratification that flow from economic inequity and the stagnation of working and lower income family wages. No surprise there either, but the terrible nightmare that the avarice of a generation would in fact force the sins of the “fathers” of such policies fall not on their sons and daughters but on generations of low-and-moderate income families is tragic.

I have to also wonder as we wallow around looking for an explanation whether part of the paradox of making men “more attractive” economically, is that men in their precipitous financial fall have still not leaned to be the docile workers that employers demand, and whether women in their more recent climb in wages are not “leaning in” as aggressively within the workforce yet, making them more currently coveted by employers?

More training and more education would undoubtedly be good for me – and women – but finally allowing people to breakthrough and earn living wages, or what once we called “family-supporting” wages, might be the easiest way to “make men more attractive” in building and holding these families together.

Atlanta I got lucky and five students, now calling themselves the ACORN International Team at Georgia State University, picked as their major project at the GSU School of Social Work helping us develop information and support for our Remittance Justice Campaign. We assembled at a Nepalese restaurant in an Atlanta neighborhood that is at the epicenter of immigrant and refugee resettlement so that we could compare notes and make out plans for the kind of deep and extensive look at remittance experience and costs in a US-city, similar to what we have done in Toronto and Mexico City previously during this campaign.

Going around the table, the reports were encouraging. The survey instrument had taken shape. We were making progress securing translators for the target communities among Burmese, Ethiopians, and Latinos. Several churches and agencies where the students were doing field placements had already been enlisted to help and were showing some interest and enthusiasm in what we would find. The team was committed to doing blogs and social networking to communicate and get the word out. The goals of 100 completed surveys per team member could find us with 500 pieces of rich data to work into a report for ACORN International to release in Atlanta, Social Policy, and wider to engage more discussion about the need to change public policy. We were on our way.

The one roadblock that kept cropping up in some of the reports was a repeated expression of disbelief, if not outright warning, to the team from the “gatekeepers” that immigrants would refuse to share information about the real costs of remittances with us. One outfit offered to circulate it for us so that maybe they could extend more legitimacy to our questions about costs and transfer methods. Another well intentioned soul suggested we not ask specifically what the cost of remittances were or the amount sent but give “ranges” between high and low dollar amounts.

As well meaning as the comments might have been, I was amazed at how clearly they and these notions were actually building the infrastructure for financial exploitation and illiteracy for “new” Americans that would inevitably and predictably lead them now predatory and perilous paths. By avoiding real questions, discussion and engagement on practice and costs, immigrants and refugees would be relying on “word of mouth” recommendations about “best practices” rather than real data on the least expensive and most secure remittance streams and most reputable, reliable money transfer organizations (MTOs). The gatekeepers were also assuming and projecting cultural values about the appropriateness of discussions about money that might be more common here, than elsewhere, and, more importantly, were making predictions not premised on field experiences. They were projecting their own lack of comfort around financial issues onto the students before our team was in the field and could evaluate the credibility of their advice. All of this was also in the face of information from the team already that those groups receiving resettlement grants from US-based sources almost invariably sent most of the money home immediately to their families left behind, and were also clearly not getting advice on the cheapest ways to make such remittances. It also goes without saying that the team was not even asking for people’s names on the survey, unless volunteered.

In truth our experience in Canada, Mexico, and around the world where we have collected the data for the Remittance Justice Campaign is the opposite. People can hardly wait to talk about their experiences in making remittances, especially since the dollars are dear and few can believe how much the middle men are raking off. The Pew Trust and InterAmerican Bank have also contracted for such surveys repeatedly through “cold calls” and usual methodology without any difficulty.

Why would community organizers and total strangers have found that immigrants are anxious to share remittance experiences, yet some gate keeping agencies been resistant to real discussions with their “clients” about such critical issues? The answer may lie right there: seeing them as clients, rather than people, like the rest of us, trying to navigate confusing financial systems with limited information, and desperate for help. New immigrants and refugees deserve better frankly, and in this area they deserve and have earned justice not continued exploitation.